Design Approach

I have obtained various kind of experience in semiconductor industry in both Japan and US.  The excerpt of my resume below exhibits the broad experience.


SUMMARY
Creative professional with broad technical knowledge and over 16 years of VLSI engineering experience in both Japan and USA which includes managing and designing a wide range of foremost VLSIs, graphics, MPEG, USB, flash memory.   Background encompasses from front-end to back-end entire VLSI development phases such as product planning, architectural design, logic design, circuit design, mask-layout physical design, bread-board/evaluation system design, embedded software design, LSI test, and others.   Author, lecturer, and holder of 13 US patents. Excellent analytical skills for resolving complex problems.  Action oriented leadership with innovative ideas for strategic product development.   Continuously pursuing advanced technologies.


When we develop VLSI, utilizing FPGA is inevitable to verify the functionality under actual system.  FPGA nowadays provides us sufficient speed and amount of gates.  Accordingly, we can easily make any kind of VLSIs done the functional verification by FPGA combining the Verilog/VHDL simulator and logic synthesizer in both Unix and PC platform.
Long time ago, we had to make a bread board using TTLs and PALs every time we develop a certain LSIs.   The last time we made the bread board was for the development of µPD72120, advanced graphics display processor, in NEC over 15 years ago.  It needed 12 24"x24" PCB boards mounted on vertical rotatable book shelf and amazingly worked by making every one of possible efforts although the operating frequency was under 2MHz.  As a result, I was able to make graphics BIOS and visit customers showing the demonstration system before working silicon was made later.

FPGAs have surprisingly advanced today.  Additional feature of automatic test vector generation will be provided soon and the effort to make the test vector will be unnecessary.  Software people who do not know how the gates are made with the knowledge of device physics, how the test vector should be made, and how the VLSI must be tested out thoroughly, can design actual physical VLSI products that are shippable as they design software.  The age of silicon software has come.

However, only a person who actually experienced broad category of the development work can handle all things efficiently and effectively in the real world, not in imaginary optimistic world as mass media people are drawing and most people are dreaming.  The person must know everything about hardware and software, device and system, engineering and marketing.
The most important factor is intuition derived from such over-all experience.  The person can instantaneously discriminate the truth and the false (Honmono to Nisemono).

I presented Bishamon (USB to CF/MMC/SD flash memory Bridge LSI) at Santa Clara Convention Center in October, 2000 discussing about USB flash memory and predicted the future replacement of floppy disk drive by USB flash memory stick at the end.  High resolution slides

A couple of small examples attached exhibits how I proceed to study and develop things practically.  It is not necessary to say that the design approach exhibited here can be applied to very large scale development as well.

The PDF documents below contain block diagrams, timing charts, emulation C source code, Verilog HDL source code, and the Verilog simulation result exhibiting the wave form.

 (1) NRZI (Non-Return-To-Zero) encoder & decoder
 (2) CRC16 (Cyclic Redundancy Check: X16+X15+X2+X0) generator
 (3) CRC5 (Cyclic Redundancy Check: X5+X2+X0) generator
 (4) USB SIE (Universal Serial Bus Serial Interface Engine) receiver